New Features in Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central falls into Microsoft’s 6 monthly release cycle (October and April). During these releases Microsoft provides a range of updates to the platform. These updates include new features, bug fixes, updates to the user interface (UI) and more.

Here is a summary of the changes coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central in April 2019.

Data and AI – a key area of focus for Microsoft is improving the connectivity and data platform that Business Central sits on.
The Common Data Service (CDS) is where the rest of Dynamics 365 lives and allows those systems to connect. The ambition is to add Business Central to the CDS.
The integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales will be strengthened and will now be carried out through the CDS.
Business Central users get intelligent insights generated by Dynamics 365 AI for Sales including notes synching, late payment prediction and predictive opportunity scoring. This move towards the CDS will eventually make it possible to easily connect all of the Dynamics 365 applications – watch this space.

Productivity – Microsoft has added more keyboard-centric scenarios, keeping in mind speed of data entry and analysis, such as quick entry, list sorting, and data values. Microsoft has also introduced several improvements to features related to the customer context, such as work date and the company indicator.
Options have been added enabling advanced users to be even more productive, including focus mode, totals for lists, improved search, and the new page inspector.
Microsoft has addressed feedback related to filters in Excel export, common auto-save experience, and modern interface elements, such as the date picker, refreshed action bar, and all-product navigation.

User Experience – there are a number of updates to the user experience in the April release. Business Central becomes more intuitive thanks to an advanced personalisation experience and better discoverability of new features – this includes refreshed action menus and groups across the product, and the ability to personalise those to suit the user’s preference.

Performance – Business Central will run much faster with a focus on typical business scenarios and usage patterns. The experience in the browser is more responsive thanks to on-demand loading of page elements, server resources are optimised for fast user interaction, and the database has been tuned to handle more and to load data faster.

More Apps – investment has been made in the platform aimed at making it easier to build applications that can work on Business Central. This should encourage more applications being built.

This is a high-level overview of some of the features coming to Dynamics 365 for Business Central that are due in April 2019, and most of these features are available in preview. For users of Dynamics 365 Business Central these updates come at no extra charge and as long as you are using the system you will see a continued set of changes and improvements every 6 months making the system better and better.